French defence provider Thales SA has won the first contract for the UK national ID card project.
The Identity and Passport Service is paying Thales £18m over four years to design, build and test a National Identity Register to support the cards. The total cost of the project is disputed, but will run to several billion pounds …

Didn't Thales do the ID card sytem for China?

Eh ?

@ RotaCyclic

They won't need to arrest people and take them to court - this is another example of how they are bringing in "no courts needed" penalties. You refuse to get a card when told, you get slapped with a £1000 "civil penalty" - no legal action required. Refuse to pay the £1000 ? No problem, they just slap on another "civil penalty" until you either pay up and submit, or they declare you bankrupt.

@ David Webb

ID cards have never, ever, been intended to be anything other than compulsory. They will be compulsory in that over time you will find it harder and harder to do anything without one - but it will still be optional. Optional as long as you don't want to drive (ID card to get driving licence), work (ID card required as proof of being a UK citizen, so employer won't take chance of prosecution for employing you without proof), catch a bus, get treatment for illness, .... You only have to look at their current plans to see how ID cards are intended to become compulsory in everything but name.

Don't blame the company, blame the employees.

It would be nice to find out how many Thales employees resign in protest of the work they're being made to do. If none then they are no better than the f*ck wits who thought about this scheme in the first place.

@Chris W

"The argument that a forged card will allow people to pass through security checks is not really valid"

You may have a point, we don't really have a way of testing how easy they are to forge at the moment. I think the idea that they may lead to a false sense of security is that they don't provide a safeguard against home grown terrorists (As I think most of the 7/7 and 21/7 bombers were). These people would already have ID cards beacuse they were British. So plod would see them, see they've got ID cards and wave them on their way. This means that ID cards would serve no benefit, but people would believe they were safer. So if they serve no benefit, why bring them in? Why spend £19bn on a scheme that most commentators agree will not achieve the stated aims? Because there are obviously unstated aims that it WILL achieve. Alternatively they're going to start coding religion/political preference on the card and using that as a basis for arrests

@ Anomalous Cowherd, Rotacyclic et al.

"£18 million to build a database that is going to hold 66 million records?"

No; not to build it. That's someone else's contract: one of the Big 5's. Though this being the IPS/Home Office, all is unnecessarily obscure and mysterious in order to discourage TV journalists from taking an interest. It appears Thales are going to be paid to write the missing basic spec for the system.

Oh yes, we're more than 4 years in and there's still no actual spec. And they claim to know that its it is all going to cost slightly less than the number they thought of in 2005.

I will refuse an ID card and I know that thousands if not millions will do so as well.

on a break

@ SImon Hobson

haha! You pretty much said was I was going to post before I got distracted. A system like this should not be in place because it will be open to abuse!

Many years ago I used to work on a helpdesk and they introduced a system called HiPath. The team leaders loved the new system because they could check in real-time how long you spent doing tasks and the reasons you where not taking calls by the codes you selected. There would be times that I would be on a break or about finish my long shift and my phone would magacally go into available status. The new system gave them power, and they abused it to suit their needs. Sometimes it was to make the figures look good to please their masters, and sometimes it was to get personal. The sad thing is that I know what it was like before and during it's installation, the generations after me will just go along with the status quo and be subject to it and the people that run it.

We (the people) should accept a system like this with society the way it is. At the end of the day people are still people and society still has not evolved very much, current media shows us that.

Something Silly in the Air

quote Brimful : "It would be nice to find out how many Thales employees resign in protest of the work they're being made to do. If none then they are no better than the f*ck wits who thought about this scheme in the first place."

Bit stupid to be honest Brimful, sounds like you've not thought this through. May be the scheme isn't a good one but its got nothing to do with the employee's at Thales.

Infact I actually work at Thales. Its got nothing to do with the people working on the project. In the long run they need to get paid. I'm sure people will have to work on many different projects throughout their careers that they don't agree with. End of the day a jobs a job and you've got to take pride in what you do and accept that. If the government wants the project to go ahead i'm sure it will even if people at Thales protest, the only thing that will happen then is it will go to a crap American company who doesn't care about the project, isn't based in the UK and they'll take the money and balls it up.

I think you've got to think about all the benefits of the project, no ones forcing you to get an ID card yet so calm down I can't see what your problem is i'm sure it'll be tested well and I personally think its gonna be a good thing for the average citizen unless you've got something to hide.

Not exactly hard

Not exactly hard to creat a spec, chip on the card with ni/ss number and country code, atm network with a authorization id for each which returns allowed tabs/pages, on top global info page with your pic etc

nothing to hide, nothing to gain!

@ Anonymous Coward

I've got nothing to hide, but what am I gaining from this? This card will not grant me access to anything that I can already get now. Before you know it they'll have your whole life on the card with no benifits.

Apparently CCTV makes people feel safer, but it does not stop crimes if the the person is serious about it. I could say this would protect/stop terrorists, but we all know that's a joke. And it won't stop random frenzied attacks, which happen to the poor young man on the greyhound in canada.

Waat ees theese you are say-eeeng?

Given a choice of having a French company create the database - and having the job factored out to a British one, or an Indian one... Vive La France - tout la jour. Anyway - I'm Scottish... we never had a problem with France - well, not one that can't be fixed with a small razor... or a large gillotine.

Just disadvantages

Thales employees should be resigning over this, not harping on about the advantages of identification and posting as anonymous cowards - worried about being ID'd?

At the very least we should build in penalty clauses to the contract such that financial penalties will be incurred directly by the participants both the company and the person, if any information is lost in anyway, or the system is in anyway compromised or misused, throughout its entire lifespan.

That should make life at Thales an interesting one, heavy vetting of the employees who work on the project, and the pressure of actually producing a secure system, well if they have nothing to hide and they are up to the job that should be a stroll down l'avenue, shouldn't it now.

£19,000,000,000? well ...

give this to the police and law enforcement, fire the political correctness brigade, withdraw from the European Human Rights agreement (and the Union), and crime and terrorism in UK will be irradicated, pensioners will have money to pay for their fuel, our armed forces will afford bullet proof bras, schools will have a etter standard of education, and parent can smack their children etc.. etc.. o the list is long

Of course

It would make a great impact on fraud, makes it easier, with all you information IN ONE BASKET, er, I mean CARD. And it's proven that it's not that hard to crack and copy those things only a few years ago.

A system of many layers

ID card should be renamed "Benefits Card"

..and only used for benefits, coz thats where multiples of 19mil quid is being frittered away every year. Born & bred overseas, but in UK 16 years, I've observed that the primary root of malaise is all to do with the amount of money that is squandered on social services - oh yes - you Poms are so limp-wristed when it comes to tough love... every one with a sob story (illegal immigrants, and lazy locals alike) is the poor fluffy puppy with the sore paw that needs a benefit package i.e. money thrown at them...

curtail duff SocServ payments by 100%...

As for Thales doing the spec for 19mil, well hats off to them... OTOH, with so much bitching about a foreign company doing it, what UK owned company would be better? Why not Reed Elsevier, who run LexisNexis to look over the shoulder of every US citizen?